The Bookstore (37 page)

“I need . . . I need . . .”

I want to say apples, but I think it is bad to say apples. I think of different fruit.

“. . . some sliced watermelon,” I say. “They sell it, ready sliced, at all the corner delis.”

“You don’t need any watermelon. And it will be frozen. It’s freezing out here.”

“I do need it! It has special vitamins in it. And I like the juxtaposition of the colors.”

Luke sighs.

“Okay. I’ll buzz when I’ve found some sliced watermelon.”

Before I arrived in New York, one of my Cambridge tutors told me that one of the many bonuses of living here was that you could buy turnips at three in the morning. This wasn’t a draw for me, but the tutor was East Anglian born and bred, and so had a particular fondness for root vegetables. But the fact that I can pluck the idea of watermelon out of the blue, and a few minutes later there will be watermelon, is very pleasurable. Perhaps it is corrupting, too. We start to believe we can have whatever we want.

When Luke comes in, he has his guitar and half of an enormous watermelon.

“They had no sliced,” he says. “Get back in bed. I’ll cut some for you.”

“Why have you got your guitar?” I ask him, when he comes in with a white plate and a huge red slice. “Are you going to play to me, like a minstrel?”

“No. I have a gig.”

“Really?”

“Yeah—I play with a couple bands—we have a gig tonight.”

“That’s good. Where?”

Luke looks uncomfortable. He looks around the room and then says, “Brooklyn.”

He lives somewhere in midtown. I am about to say how nice it is of him to come so far out of his way, when I realize that that’s why he looks so uncomfortable. He is not the sort of person who wants a kind deed praised.

I eat some of the giant slice of watermelon. I don’t want to spit out the seeds in front of Luke, so I hope that they are nutritious, and I swallow them. Why didn’t I say apples?

“How you doing today, anyway?” he says. “Is it—better?”

“It is,” I say. “It hasn’t stopped completely, but I think it is better. I might call the doctor.”

“Don’t take it too fast. You want to be sure.”

He looks nice again. He has a white linen shirt on with his jeans—it makes him look browner. I must remember about the hormones—they make me find almost everyone attractive. I had an interesting dream about Richard Nixon the other night, for instance, that is probably best forgotten.

“Luke—you never get hormones dancing around inside you, messing with your mind, do you?”

He shrugs. “How would I know?”

“When you’re pregnant, they do all sorts of things to you. This morning, I got so upset about the soldiers in Afghanistan—you know, the British and American ones that die? It came out of nowhere. It must be hormones.”

“Or empathy.”

“It hit me, as well, about how scary it will be”—the gods force me to correct myself—“how scary it might be, to be a mother.”

“That doesn’t sound like hormones. It’s gotta be real scary to be a mother.”

“Yes. Yes.”

I want him to stay, but—fairly unusually—I don’t want to
talk at all. He doesn’t seem to mind too much. We are there for quite a while, in silence. Then he says, “Maybe I should get going . . .”

I say, “If you’ve got time, would you play something? Like when you played ‘You’ve Got a Friend’?”

He puts his head back, turns his face to the side a little, uncomfortable again.

“I would really like you to,” I say, to persuade him out of what looks like shyness.

“Esme, something happened. We didn’t know whether to tell you.”

I wait, frightened, because he is so grave.

“It’s Dennis.” He stops. I put my hands to my mouth.

“He’s dead, honey. They found him in a basement on Amsterdam.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know—other street guys. Tee told DeeMo. He was taken to the morgue early this morning.”

“What was it?” I ask. “When do they think he died? What did he die of?”

None of the questions I am asking matters, but we have to ask them. I want Luke not to know the answers, or I want to be able to say,
Aha! You’re wrong, that’s the wrong answer to that tiny question. Therefore he can’t possibly be dead.

He says, “The medical examiner figured it was an overdose, but he didn’t know for sure on the spot. There was a needle near him.”

“But that can’t be right—he was an alcoholic.”

“Yeah. I don’t think you have to specialize.”

I look down at the covers, thinking of Dennis, of his laughing at DeeMo’s prison meadows, of how he ate his bagel.

“Could it have been something else? Hunger?”

Luke clasps his hands together and leans on them. “Hunger, exposure, drugs, drink—it could have been any of them, all of them. I’m sorry. We all liked him.”

“Yes—yes—oh, Luke, have you known him a long time?”

“Yep. Years now. Strange but true.”

“So it’s hard for you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m okay.”

“I must be better in time for the funeral.”

He looks startled. “Esme, there isn’t likely to be one. He’ll probably get buried in a potter’s field—Hart Island, most likely. They don’t have services.”

I don’t understand what he’s talking about, with potter’s fields and islands.

“How can they bury someone without a service?”

“That’s what they do with the homeless, with unknowns, with people who don’t have family. And nobody knows Dennis’s last name.”

“But he had a daughter. And why should the unknowns not have prayers?”

He looks surprised again. “I never knew that, about a daughter. He’s never said anything about a daughter to me. He—you know, he might have made her up. He did tell lies all the damn time. Do you know her name?”

“It was Josie.”

“Josie . . . ?”

“I—I don’t remember her last name. How much is it to have a proper burial?” I ask.

He sighs. “Esme, I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Yes, you should. You should. How much is it?”

“Honey, we can’t do it. It’s, I dunno, it’s got to be thousands. And don’t ask George. He’s really stretched, and he would try.”

“I can ask Mitchell,” I say. He doesn’t reply.

“I will ask Mitchell,” I say. I say it because it seemed wrong when I said it the first time. Luke is still silent.

“Aren’t there Rights of Man?” I ask. “I mean, this is America, where all men were created equal; don’t you get to at least have a funeral when you die, no matter where you lived, or how—?” Stupid tears are coming again.

“Don’t cry,” he says. “Honey, don’t cry. Dennis as much as any of us wanted you to keep that baby safe.”

“I’m not, I don’t,” I say, wiping them away.

“You cry a hell of a lot for someone who doesn’t cry.”

“I know. I liked Dennis, that’s all.”

“I liked him too.”

We are both quiet. I say, “Luke, can you play something in memory of Dennis? That would be a way of doing it.”

Luke looks extremely uncomfortable.

“I dunno. It seems—no, I can’t.”

“Oh, please. Please. Sing ‘Danny Boy.’ ”

“I broke a string.”

“Can’t you play a tune that doesn’t use that string?”

“It’s a G,” he says.

I nod as if I understand.

Luke says, “Listen, I didn’t really break a string, but I can’t do that, sing a song for Dennis. It doesn’t feel right. It feels kind of cheesy. But how about I play a tune for your baby?”

He picks the guitar up.

“Your hands are like a bear’s hands,” I say.

“Bears don’t have hands.”

He plucks at the strings and plays a lovely, slow little tune.

I lie back on the pillows and listen, and send it outwards, wherever it wants to go. Inside the sadness, a peace blossoms.

When he has finished the music, I say, “That’s beautiful. Is it Mozart?”

“No. It’s
Lady and the Tramp
.” He stands up, and then says, “Esme.” He is looking out of the window. “It’s snowing,” he says.

Giant soft flakes are falling. I get out of bed and come to the window.

We watch as they fall, bigger and more rapid and more numerous than in England. At home, you watch so hopefully as they land, and then they dissolve into the wet ground; here they stay. In minutes we are in a white world. Bright, china-white light fills the room.

“It’s so beautiful,” says Luke. “Even Broadway.”

“Especially Broadway,” I say.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

“I want to go out in it,” I say.

“Too bad. Not until you’re okay. I’m not helping you out here so that you can go running around in a snowstorm.”

I turn to him to say thank you, and try to infuse into the two words how much I mean it. I put my hand on his arm as I say it. I never touch Luke. There is an expression in his eyes that I can’t read. Then he glances down at his watch, but I know whatever time it is, he is going.

“I’d better get going,” he says. “With the snow—this gig . . .”

He turns and gets his guitar, puts it in its bag. I stand still.

“Get back in bed,” he says, nodding over at it.

“I will,” I say. “Thanks, Luke.”

“So long,” he says.

The door closes behind him. I go back to the bed, and look out at the snow and wish I could untouch him. He didn’t like it.

It is deeper than I have ever seen. Parked cars are covered in it. Every available horizontal space, however tiny, has a deep settlement of snow. Traffic is thinning and then slows and by evening there are only the buses, and then even they peter out; I wonder if there is some sort of severe-weather warning that is stopping them, but I still don’t want to check online or switch the radio on. The intense quality of the silence is too precious. It is hard to imagine anything stopping New Yorkers, but here they are, stopped. The whole city is covered in white and none of the rules apply. I do not want to move, I do not want there to be time. I want to live in a world that has always just been covered with fresh snow.

I watch it all day. With Luke, I saw the first flakes fall and settle on the blue mailbox and the traffic lights and the green awning of the Koreans’ market, and I carry on looking as they fall, deep and soft and silencing, until I am watching in the dark. I push open the window and feel the flakes as they melt on my outstretched hand. Then I lean out a little. Broadway. Broadway in the freshly fallen
snow. There are times when you are more aware of being alive, aware that living is painful, not because it is terrible but because it is wonderful.

I think of how many different people it is falling on. How it is falling on the homeless guys on Riverside, who are hoping it won’t slant into their tunnel, falling on the rich on Fifth Avenue, looking out of their high windows before they draw their high curtains, and on all the millions of others—the dog walkers and the doctors and the lawyers and the lovers. How it must be settling on the glinting silver of the Chrysler Building and on the chicken wire and rubbish bins of the Bowery, on the curves of the Guggenheim, and on the swooping lines of the George Washington Bridge, and on the noble heads of the library lions, and on Liberty’s lamp, and into the Hudson River, white flakes into dark water. All of Manhattan, all of New York, must be transfigured by this snow that is falling, like a benediction, free and unearned, upon us. The slow swoon of it, but into life.

The peace that began when Luke was there settles like the fresh snow. I know this snow is really just snow; it is not a divine seal-setting on a petition and an answering gift. Yet if I lift up my face to accept the snow, might it not be wisdom to lift up my face and accept whatever else happens, whatever happens to the baby? Must there be grief if I lose it? Yes, there must, there will be, if I do. But this snow, this blessing—not for me, but for us all—makes me think that it is not what befalls us that we should be focused on, but how we react to the befalling.

It is easy to say it, especially on such a night. I know that this peace, or wisdom, is really because of a feeling that the danger is past; if there is fresh blood next time I check, there won’t be any more pious reflections on benediction.

The phone rings and it is Mitchell, checking that I am all right. I say I am. He says he will brave all snow and rain and heat and gloom of night to reach me and check for himself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO